An imperfect and sometimes sarcastic perspective on following Jesus by author Ed Cyzewski.

How to Become a Better Faith Blogger: An Unbounded Niche

I started blogging without any clue about my audience. I just figured that I was sharing brilliant ideas that everyone would be falling over themselves to read.

Not so much.

There’s a little rule in book publishing that writing to everyone means you’re writing to no one. There’s a lot of truth there. I also experienced this during my first few years of blogging.

I was just writing for Christians. Or, more ideally, “for everyone.”

Whoops.

As I’ve stumbled forward with my writing, my beliefs, and my audience, I’ve been trying to pin down how to write for a specific group of people without necessarily alienating would-be readers outside my “niche.”

One glorious day I found a post titled “I’m Comic Sans Asshole.” It was sharp, funny, and brilliantly written. I figured anyone writing for this website had to be a top notch writer.

One day Sarah Bessey linked to a post titled “We Are Fundamentalists” by D. L Mayfield. As it turned out, the website that brought me “I’m Comic Sans Asshole” also brought me a writer who masterfully related stories about living in the upside down Kingdom of God, resisting the pull of consumer-driven America with her commitment to downward mobility and love for neighbors.

Here was a Christian living out the radical calling of Jesus and writing about it with tremendous integrity and attention to her craft on a leading website that was by no means Christian—especially that Comic Sans.

D. L. taught me about writing for a niche… and not.

There’s no doubt that progressive evangelicals will find much to love about D. L.’s writing, but her niche doesn’t stop with that group. By sharing from her life, she composes stories that have their own integrity both with her honesty and with the quality of her writing.

Here is someone who could just as comfortably read that post as a testimony on Sunday morning or at a public reading in a coffee shop.

While we can’t always write for everyone, we can write for a niche in such a way that our work has its own integrity and power so that our niche is open and unbounded by insider jargon or divisive language.

I can’t tell you exactly how the Women in Ministry Series came about, but I can assure you that D.L.’s writing helped me see that we needed to move beyond the women in ministry debates and start telling stories that could reach beyond our tired theology and commentaries.

I’ve learned that I need to write for a niche, but I don’t have to limit myself to that niche. I can write with a razor sharp focus without cutting those who disagree with me. That is something I learned from D.L. Mayfield, and I’m sure it’s not the last.

Well, that just made my day! Maybe one of the nicest compliments I have ever received! To be fair, to go outside of niche is to not necessarily be . . . successful. Know what I mean? Thanks so much for always using your space to champion others, Ed.

Thanks for dropping by D.L. I refuse to believe that’s one of the nicest compliments about your writing. The bloggers I know were practically swooning over those McSweeney’s articles. Swooning I tell you! Maybe this is the nicest one you’ve read, but I assure you that this is just scratching the surface.

And I agree on going outside of a niche, though I think “success” is such a tricky term. Is the author with the most sales writing the best books? Perhaps I’m delusional, but if someone can make readers care, that’s a kind of success, even if it doesn’t bring in the big bucks. If someone can build backlinks or get some press for a book or blog, that’s good marketing, but that doesn’t necessarily make that person a writer I can learn from–at least as far as craft goes.

This. This is something I need someone to help me figure out. I’ve been writing for two years now, and I too, need to move away from writing just for “christians” which is “for everyone” as you so eloquently pointed out.